Robert Cromie
1855–1907
Biography
Robert Cromie (1855–1907) was an Irish writer who earned his living in banking while producing novels, articles and stories. He was born at Clough in County Down, into a Presbyterian family in which his father served as the local registrar of births and deaths. He was taught at home before attending a school in Belfast. Instead of an academic career he joined the Ulster Bank, which posted him to several towns in Ireland before he settled at its head office in Belfast. He wrote about cycling tours of Ulster in the early 1880s and was a keen golfer, captain of the Ormeau Golf Club in 1898. He never married, and he died in Belfast in April 1907.
His first book, For England's Sake, appeared in 1889. A Plunge into Space (1890), a science fiction novel, drew attention, and Jules Verne contributed a preface to its second edition. Cromie later pointed out resemblances between it and H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, which came out about ten years afterwards. He went on to publish a steady stream of novels and story collections, among them The Next Crusade, The King's Oak and Other Stories and El Dorado.
The Crack of Doom (1895) was his most successful novel, and it is the book on this site. It is usually credited as the earliest fictional account of an atomic blast, which is why he still appears in histories of early science fiction. Cromie is a good example of a writer who worked a respectable day job and wrote in the periodicals and book trade of his time, and the copy here lets readers meet him through his most ambitious book.
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Books
The Crack of Doom
by Robert Cromie
A brilliant scientist's discovery of how to release the energy locked in matter puts the world at the mercy of a madman, and a young pair race to stop him. Robert Cromie's 1895 novel is an early science thriller. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.